The Weight of Watching
The rain had been falling since noon, the kind of steady coastal drizzle that never quite committed to a storm, just softened every edge of Ivory Cove into gray. Ezra Vane stood at the window of his shop and watched it slick the cobblestones outside, watched the last stragglers of the evening hurry past with their collars turned up and their eyes down, none of them glancing at the darkened glass that read VANE'S MEATS in chipped gold script, none of them able to see him standing just behind it, watching them back.
He turned the sign to CLOSED with the quiet click of a man completing a small and necessary ceremony.
The shop exhaled around him. It always did, this time of night — the hum of the walk-in cooler, the tick of the old radiator fighting the damp, the particular hush that settled over a room once its purpose for the day had been fulfilled. Ezra loved this hour best. Loved it the way some men loved church, though he supposed that was not far from what this was.
He began, as he always began, with the knives.
There were seven of them laid out on the felt-lined tray beneath the counter, each one his own, each one older than most of the marriages in this town. He lifted the…
